According to a recent study presented at a meeting of the executive committee of National Taskforce on Information and Communication Technologies (NTICT), only 28 per cent of government administrators can operate a computer, despite US$13.6 million spent to date on the national e-government project since 2002. The Bangladesh E-Government Project was approved by the National Economic Council to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, transparency and accountability of the government.
At the first stage, facilities including email, file tracking, document sharing were introduced in seven chosen ministries - health, home affairs, land, information, labour and manpower, foreign affairs and planning ministries. Intranets, paperless document management, decision support tools and video conferencing were also introduced into these ministries.
A full-fledged training programme was integrated into the e-government roll-out, but has so far failed to raise e-literacy sufficiently within the seven ministries.
According to the NTICT, incentives need to be used to motivate staff to use the new solutions. One suggestion is the use of flexible loans with low interest rates to encourage civil servants to buy computers for their own personal use. Similar schemes have been introduced in Bahrain.
Quelle: Public Sector Technology & Management, 16.11.2004
